Instapundit notes Barack Obama’s stance on the Democrats and religion and how it infuriates the “netroots”:
BARACK OBAMA thinks that Democrats should engage evangelicals. This gets him a Bronx cheer from Firedoglake: “[T]his bullshit from Barack Obama is Bill Clinton’s fault. The greatest victory of the radical right wing has been to train Democratic politicians to disrespect, mischaracterize and run against their base in the progressive movement. And that is Bill Clinton’s fault.”
Never mind the fact that 60 million Americans are part of evangelical churches. Never mind the fact that the vast majority of Americans are religious. One can’t be part of the “progressive” movement and still respect people of faith. That apparently disrepects the “base”. Never mind that the progressive “base” seems to be secular, white, urban liberals who make up a small percentage of even the Democratic fold. The author of the Firedoglake piece has the audacity to argue that Democrats aren’t really hostile to religion, when it is clear from the results of recent elections that voters concerned with faith find the Democratic Party indifferent or even hostile to religion and values.
This is just more evidence of how the “netroots” are strangling the Democratic Party – I totally disagree with most everything Barack Obama says, but he’s right on the need for the Democrats to be taken seriously by people of faith and speak convincingly on matters of faith and values. And when he has to face down people who want to argue that there’s no problem, and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor to the cause, it makes it all the much harder.
When the Democrats accuse anyone who argues against abortion on a moral level of a theocrat, when evangelicals are accused of being radical “Christianists” and religious faith is frequently looked upon as a sign of ignorance, one can be pretty damned sure that the Democrats have a problem with being seen as hostile to faith. Given the fact that the “netroots” are trying to wrest an increasing amount of control in the Democratic Party, that problem is only going to get worse.
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Evangelicals get a bad rap from the media. Very few of the 60 million evangelicals in the US actually follow the teachings of James Dobson or Pat Robertson or Ralph Reed. Their goofball views are used to paint 20% of the U.S. population as dimwits, simply because they worship the same god.
Still… once you’re willing to deny the existance of dinosaurs, I think you should stop trying to influence public policy. But even this limitation only excludes a small fraction of those identitifed as evangelicals. Evangelicals are not necessarily the same thing as fundamentalists. Literalist fundamentalism is as much a sign of ignorance in christians as it is in muslims.